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RECOLLECTIONS 
AS A SOURCE OF HISTORY 

BY 

EDWARD L. PIERCE. 



RECOLLECTIONS 



AS A SOURCE OF HISTORY. 



A PAPER READ BY 



EDWARD L. PIERCE 



BEFORE 



Ci^e 0ia^^atl^nmt^ ^imvical ^ocittv, 



March 12, 1896. 



CAMBRIDGE: 

JOHN WILSON AND SON. 

SSnibersttg ^rrss. 

1896. 




<5 



RECOLLECTIONS AS A SOURCE OF 
HISTORY. 



The memory is in a strict sense the basis of historical 
narrative. The historian draws his materials from records, 
newspapers, diaries, letters, and other written or oral accounts ; 
and these at first or second hand come from the memory. 
The diarist, who writes out at evening the transactions of the 
day, puts in permanent form what he remembers to have seen 
and heard since morning. The general, who reports a battle a 
day or a week after it took place, relies on his own recollec- 
tions and those of others. But the memory, without which 
there could be little knowledge of the past, is, even when 
only a short distance of time is covered, a most uncertain and 
treacherous faculty ; and the historian must keep its limi- 
tations constantly in mind. He must not, indeed, overlook 
other things, — the honesty and fidelity of the narrator who 
claims to have been on the spot, the accuracy of his percep- 
tions, and the advantage or disadvantage of his standpoint ; 
but assuming these conditions to be satisfactory, he must still 
be critical, even sceptical, in the treatment of testimony ; and 
his scepticism should be the more exacting the longer the 
period intervening between the transaction and the report. 

This paper will deal not with testimony given shortly after the 
event, but with recollections coming out several years later, — 
ten, twenty, or fifty ; necessarily coming, where the interval is 
long, from old people whose other faculties may be still fresh 
and active, but whose memory, failing them before a general 
decay has set in, makes their accounts worthless, at least in 
the decision of any question where controversy has arisen. 



The honest man as he advances in years confesses his own 
weakness in this respect. John Adams, whose mood was reminis- 
cent to the last, writing when nearly seventy-nine of the author- 
ship of a Revolutionary pamphlet, said : " The Group has 
convinced me of the decay of my memory more than anything 
that has yet occurred " ; and later in the same letter he breaks 
out pathetically, " Help ! Oh, help my memory ! " ^ 

One need not be as old as seventy-nine to distrust himself 
in this respect. If any one of us were to have all his letters 
written in youth and early manhood brought to him, he would 
find in them vivid pictures of some scenes which he had 
wholly forgotten and could not, even with the assistance of the 
written account, recall, and of other scenes which lay in his 
mind very differently from the way in which he described 
them at the time. 

Retentiveness of memory in persons of equal intelligence 
varies greatly. Some retain only general impressions, while 
others retain a firm hold on details. When I used in the 
seventies to ask Mr. Longfellow about things occurring in the 
thirties and forties, he would often say, " You had better ask 
Hillard." The latter was remarkable for the freshness and 
accuracy of his recollections ; and the same may be said of the 
late Judge Hoar. 

One frailty which perplexes advancing years is the incapa- 
city to distinguish between what one has seen and what one 
has only heard ; and the -result is that the two kinds of knowl- 
edge are hopelessly mixed together. The late Henry W. 
Paine, while still holding a foremost rank at the bar, used to 
describe a scene witnessed by him when Daniel Webster pre- 
sented publicly to Charles Sumner, then a youth, a prize for an 
essay. Mr. Paine on reading Sumner's Memoir (vol. i. pp. 73, 
74) discovered that he had fallen into an anachronism, as the 
presentation took place before he and Sumner met as stu- 
dents at the Harvard Law School. Happening to see his 
old comrade at the school, Wendell Phillips, enter the court- 
room, he communicated to him his error, saying, " What a 
wretched thing, Wendell, the memory is ! " The explana- 
tion is, that Mr. Paine had in early life heard the story, 
and, telling it often, had come to believe that he himself 
was present. 

1 Works, vol. X. pp. 99, 100. 



Recollections may have a considerable value when they cor- 
roborate each other, as when they are given by different 
persons testifiying without collusion or conference and gen- 
erally agreeing in details. This test of evidence is familiar 
to lawyers. 

Recollections may be of some use in coloring a narrative, 
where the substantial facts have been settled by trustworthy 
evidence; but even to this extent they are to be taken with 
extreme caution. I have had occasion to relate scenes, as 
a debate in Congress, which I had myself witnessed and de- 
scribed at the time ; and long afterwards descriptions came 
out with incidents which I could not recall and which were 
not verified by contemporary accounts. I have therefore been 
obliged to suggest that there might be exaggeration in such 
recollections.^ Mr. Hay, one of the biographers of Lincoln, 
once told me that he and his associate rejected anecdotes 
and narratives not supported by contemporary records or 
reports. 

This paper relates to periods which have been illustrated 
by abundant contemporary materials, and is altogether aside 
of the questions which were raised by Niebuhr's treatment of 
early Roman history. It deals only with periods where twi- 
light has passed into clear day. Nor will any attempt be 
made to weigh and compare the different kinds of evidence 
competent to prove historical facts, whether original, secon- 
dary, hearsay, or traditionary. Without doubt the best kind is 
the testimony of intelligent and trustworthy eye-witnesses, 
promptly and faithfidly transcribed on imperishable records ; 
but with something less than this history must often be con- 
tent in determining the general features of a transaction, or 
the share in it which belongs to particular individuals. 

The view here given of the value of personal recollections 
invites attention to some instances where they have been 
shown to be without value, even after they had found credence 
with investigators. 

In October, 1895, I listened at Cornell University to the 
opening lecture of a course, by Professor H. Morse Stephens, 
on the sources of the history of the French Revolution, among 
them diaries of eye-witnesses, memoirs, and public documents ; 
and he assigned small value to memoirs written several years 

^ Sumner Memoir, vol. iii. pp. G07 note, 610 note. 



6 

after the events, by persons who had been contemporary with 
them.i 

The " Boston Tea Party " took place December 16, 1773. 
The date and general features of the transaction are well ascer- 
tained ; but no one of its members is known by satisfactory 
proofs. In order to identify them there should be some con- 
temporaneous record, diary, or letter, or, at least, testimonies 
of responsible individuals, made independently of each other, 
substantially concurring, and given at least within fifteen or 
twenty years after the event. There were obvious reasons 
for reticence until the recognition of American Independence 
in 1783, but they ended with that date. When the contest with 
Great Britain had been successfully terminated, an avowal of 
connection with the destruction of the tea could entail no 
loss, and would insure honor, perhaps pensions, to the partici- 
pants. Nevertheless, no one, so far as my researches have 
gone, confessed to any connection with it till about half a 
century after the affair, — when he had become so old as to be 
unable to distinguish between what he had seen and what he 
had only heard. The credibility of his narration would then 
be no more than that of the depositions of the Bunker Hill 
veterans hereinafter referred to. 

There is no contemporaneous written evidence as to the 
participants in the " Tea Party." Peter Edes, writing February 
18, 1886, of his father, Benjamin Edes, said: "It is a little 
surprising that the names of the Tea Party were never 
made public. My father, I believe, was the only person who 
had a list of them, and he always kept it locked up in his desk 
while living." ^ This statement, made in the way it is, does 
not justify the belief that such a list ever existed. 

The number engaged in the " Tea Party "has been stated 
variously, ranging from seventeen to three hundred ; and there 
have been discrepancies in the reminiscent statements as to 
the wharf where the ships lay and the number of the ships, 
though these points are now settled. 

John Adams, who may have had some knowledge before- 
hand of what was to take place, wrote to Mr. Niles as late as 

1 Since this paper was read, Professor Stepliens's article entitled " Recent 
Memoirs of tlie French Directory " has appeared in the " American Historical 
Review" for April, 1896, in which (pp. 475, 476, 489) he comments on the value 
of memoirs as historical evidence. 

- Proceedings, vol. xii. p. 175. 



May 10, 1819 : " I now tell you, in truth and upon honor, that 
I know not and never knew the name of any one of them " ; 
that is, of the participants in the " Tea Party." He avoided 
knowledge at the time, so as not to be a competent witness 
against any one in a criminal prosecution. Two years before 
the date of this letter a visitor " blurted out the name " of 
one member to Mr. Adams, but he would not commit it to 
writing. Curiously enough, he states in the same letter that 
he was at Plymouth at the time of the event, whereas his 
journal and his letter to James Warren, December 17, 1773, 
show him to have been then in Boston, — another instance of 
the untrustworthiness of old men's memories.^ 

Not long after the date of Mr. x\daras's letter to Niles, when 
an interval of nearly fjfty years had passed, and the actors 
may be presumed to have reached an age between seventy-five 
and ninety, reporters and interviewers began to seek several 
garrulous persons who pretended to know about the " Tea 
Party." Family traditions came out of a father or son having 
tea found in his boots the morning after the affair. Niles's 
" Principles and Acts of the Revolution," pp. 485, 486, re- 
prints from the " Boston Daily Advertiser " (date not given) ^ 
a report of conversations with the survivors of the period, who 
disagreed as to the number of the ships and the wharf where 
they lay. This interviewer nays : " The contrivers of this 
measure and those who carried it into effect will never be 
known. . . . None of those persons who were confidently said 
to have been of the party (except some who were then minors or 
very young men) have ever admitted that they were so. The 
person who appeared to know more than any one I ever spoke 
with, refused to mention names. . . . There are verj- few alive 
now who helped to empty the chests of tea, and these few 
will probably be as prudent as those who have gone before 
them." This writer gives no names of persons taking part in 
the affair. 

One of the interviewed persons ascribes to John Rowe the 
words spoken at the meeting at the Old South Church, " Who 
knows how tea will mingle with salt water ? " — language used 

1 John Adams's Works, vol. ii. pp. 323, 334 ; vol. ix. p. 333. 

- The original communication has, after a search, been discovered in the issue 
of that journal for November 10, 1821. The first of the writer's series was pub- 
Ushed October 30, 1821. 



to instigate the populace to the act. These words attributed to 
Rowe have been cited on this authority alone by reputable 
authors. They are on their face incredible, for Rowe was an 
owner of one of the tea cargoes, and had enough of human 
nature in him not to exhort others to destroy his own prop- 
erty. And now just a year ago appeared his Diary, which 
makes it clear that he disapproved altogether the transaction, 
and could never have spoken the words which have again and 
again been put in his mouth. ^ The result is that the anony- 
mous writer in the "Advertiser," who reports the loose talk 
01 other anonymous people, is not deserving of credit. 

In 1835, sixty-two years after the event, " The Traits of the 
Tea Party, being a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes," was 
published. The author withheld his name, but later he was 
ascertained to be Benjamin B. Thatcher. Hewes was ninety- 
three, or nearly that age, when his account was taken down ; 
and he had believed himself to be in his one hundredth year. 
His testimony is impeached by his " positively affirming as of 
his own observation that Samuel Adams and John Hancock 
were both actively engaged in the process of destruction" 
(pages 192, 193) ; and he said further that he recognized 
Hancock, not only by his " ruffles," but by his " figure and 
gait," " features," and " voice," and that he " exchanged with 
him an Indian grunt." This was too much for even the 
credulous Thatcher, who remarks, " This is a curious remi- 
niscence, but we believe it a mistake." Whatever Adams, 
or even Hancock, may have done in advising the destruc- 
tion of the tea, no sane person believes that they took a 
personal part in the scene itself ; and there was every reason 
why such well-known leaders of the Patriot cause should 
have kept away. Now, Hewes states Hancock's presence just 
as positively as he states his own ; and his narrative can be 
relied on no more as to himself than as to others, as old men so 
often remember as seen what they have only heard. Thatcher 
appends to his memoir of Hewes a list of the " Tea Party," 
fifty-eight in all, — the first list ever printed, and indeed no 
name of any one connected with it had been before given to 
the public. He introduces the list with this explanation : 
" We subjoin here also a list which has been furnished by an 
aged Bostonian, well acquainted with the history of our sub- 

1 Proceedings, 2(1 series, vol. x. pp. 18, 19, 81, 82. 



9 

ject, of the persons generally supposed within his knowledge, 
on traditionary or other evidence, to have been more or less 
actively engaged in or present at the destruction of the Tea." 
This is in many points a curious statement. " Persons 
engaged in " are mixed with those who were merely " present 
at," whether approving or disapproving. The name of " the 
aged Bostonian " who knew so much is kept back without any 
apparent reason. It is a list of those " generally supposed " 
to have been participants or spectators, not of those known 
to have been of one or the other class. It is based on " tradi- 
tionary and other evidence," the word "other" being presu- 
mably a weaker kind of evidence than even tradition, which is 
generally thought to be the weakest of all. And yet this 
list has been adopted by Lossing, who makes the number 
fifty-nine, and by Drake, who carries it to one hundred and 
thirteen ; and upon this evidence alone descendants of persons 
so enumerated have chosen as a coat of arms a ship being 
emptied by Mohawks or a teapot fuming at the mouth. 

Another " Tea Party " claimant is David Kinnison, the 
supposed last survivor, who died in 1852 at the age of one 
hundred and fifteen. His account seems to have been given 
in 1848, seventj^-five years after the event, when he was one 
hundred and eleven years and nine months old.^ Even F. S. 
Drake, whose list, given in his " Tea Leaves," is very recep- 
tive and inclusive (page Ixxxii), admits that, " owing to the 
great age of Kinnison when this relation was made to Mr. 
Lossing, it is possibly in some particulars erroneous, and is 
given only as a piece of original evidence, and simply for 
what it is worth." This form of expression "for what it is 
worth " means in plainer English that it is not worth any- 
thing. It does not add to the value of Kinnison's account 
that in middle life he met with a severe injury, — the fracture 
of his skull and of his collar-bone and two of his ribs. 

Drake (page Ixxi) prints the account of Joshua Wyeth, who 
in 1827, fifty-four years after the event, made his narration at 
Cincinnati. He was fifteen years of age in 1773, and claimed 
to have been one of twenty-eight or thirty engaged. It is 
not likely that the real projectors of the affair, who worked 
secretly and kept their secret well, would have invited a 
youth of fifteen to join with them. 

1 Lossing's Pictorial Field Book of the Revolution, vol. i. pp. 499, 500. 

2 



10 

At this Society's commemoration of the one hundredth 
anniversary of the "Tea Party" in December, 1873, Richard 
Frothingham, a most careful and honest investigator, read a 
paper appropriate to the occasion, in which he said : " Several 
of the party have been identified, but the claims presented 
for others are doubtful " ; but he assigned no names to either 
class. He said of Thatcher's list that it was " not trustworthy 
as to those who did the work." 

At the same meeting of the Society Thomas C. Amory added 
two names to the list, those of Amos Lincoln and Colonel James 
Swan ; but he gave no proofs except by saying that when a 
Harvard student he visited Colonel Swan in London, who "re- 
counted the particulars of the destruction of the tea in which 
he assisted." As Mr. Amory graduated at Harvard College in 
1830, Colonel Swan made the communication fifty-seven 3^ears 
after the "Tea Party"; and Mr. Amory first gave it to the 
public forty-three years after it had been made to him, — 
thus carried in two memories for one hundred years. These 
intervals are too long; to admit the two narrations as bases 
of history. 

The conclusion is that no one person has been identified 
with any certainty as a member of the historic " Tea Party," 
at least upon any evidence on which a plaintiff or a prosecu- 
tor could expect a verdict, or upon the lesser evidence, that 
of reasonable probability, with which historical writers must 
sometimes be content. 

One inquiry comes naturally in this connection, — why it 
was that after the peace of 1783 the members of the "Tea 
Party " kept up their reticence concerning their own share in 
it, — a reticence which appears in John Adams's letter and in 
the account reprinted in Niles's book. Those who had borne a 
part in the civil and military history of the Revolution took 
pride in avowing what they had done for their country in 
those spheres. The men of the " Tea Party " were then 
safe from civil and criminal proceedings, and also from social 
censure, as most of the owners, the Hutchinsons and Clarkes, 
were emigres. Was their studied silence due to the instinc- 
tive shrinking of civilized people to confess a share in any 
deed of violence, whatever defences it may have, which 
lacks the sanction of law, either the civil law or the law of 
war? 



11 

When the corner-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument was 
laid in 1825, fifty years after the battle, there were present 
one hundred and ninety survivors of the array of the Revo- 
lution, forty of whom had been, or claimed to have been, 
engaged in the conflict of June 17, 1775. One of the direc- 
tors of the Monument Association, William Sullivan, assisted 
by other directors and by Judge Thatcher, wishing to pre- 
serve the details of the battle and to clear up disputed points, 
caused the depositions of the survivors to be taken. These 
or a transcript of them in three volumes were sent to this 
Society in 1842 by William Sullivan's brother Richard ; and a 
committee consisting of Ticknor, Bancroft, and Ellis was 
appointed to report on the historical character and value of 
the manuscripts. This committee came to the conclusion that 
they should be sealed up and deposited in the Cabinet as 
curiosities. It is not clear what became of them. They were 
supposed to have been returned to the Sullivan family at their 
request, and to have been burned by them ; but some of the 
originals have been since offered for sale at an auction-room 
in New York City.^ 

A note by Dr. Ellis to the Proceedings of the Society for 
April, 1842 (page 231), says : — 

" I took the books to my house in Charlestown and deliberately 
examined them. Their contents were most extraordinary ; many of 
the testimonies extravagant, boastful, inconsistent, and utterly untrue ; 
mixtures of old men's broken memories and fond imaginings with the 
love of the marvellous. Some of those who gave in affidavits about the 
battle could not have been in it, nor even in its neighborhood. They 
had got so used to telling the story for the wonderment of village listen- 
ers as grandfathers' tales, and as petted representatives of ' the spirit of 
'76,' that they did not distinguish between what they had seen and done 
and what they had read, heard, or dreamed. The decision of the com- 
mittee was that much of the contents of the volumes was wholly worth- 
less for history, and some of it discreditable, as misleading and false." 

Such is the testimony of a very competent historical critic 
as to old soldiers' accounts of battles in which they served, or 
thought they had served, long ago. It fits well what King 
Henry foretold of the survivor of Agincourt : — 

1 Proceedings, vol. ii. pp. 224, 225, 230-232, 234, 235; Narrative and Critical 
History of America, vol. vi. p. 189. 



12 

" Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, 
But he'll remember with advantages 
What feats he did that day."' 

In the Proceedings of this Society for February, 1881, pp. 
340-344, there is an account of the Garrison mob of October 
21, 1835, contributed forty -five years after the event by the late 
Ellis Ames, evidently without the assistance of any contem- 
poraneous notes. He describes what he saw of the mob, and 
then mentions a call at the law office of A. H. Fiske, on Court 
Street, just after the affair, and then a call on Charles Sumner 
at No. 4 Court Street, directly opposite, to whom he related 
what he had just seen. Then apparently intending to give 
the impression that Mr. Sumner did not disapprove, or at any' 
rate with any earnestness, what had occurred, he adds : — 

" He did not express such anxiety about the affair as Mr. Fiske did. 
If Mr. Sumner had gone to the door of his office, and walked by the 
railing on the left side about twenty-five feet, he would have come to 
a window which opened on the south side of Court Street, where by 
looking out in an easterly direction he could have seen all the doings 
of the mob which took place on State Street." 

How Mr. Sumner, whose office was in the rear, lighted only 
by an inside court, is to be held responsible for not looking at 
a scene on the street of which he knew nothing till it was all 
passed, it is impossible to see. Besides, the account which 
Mr. Ames gives and the suggestion he makes are altogether 
improbable. His statement of the interior arrangements of 
No. 4 Court Street, where he was only an occasional visitor, 
does not agree with the recollection of those who had offices 
there for a long time, among them our associates Mr. George S. 
Hale and Mr. George O. Shattuck, and who say that no window 
looked out from the hall on Court Street, but the windows 
looking out on that street were to be reached only by entering 
the front offices. Besides Mr. Sumner, who had inherited, his 
father's anti-slavery sentiments, is on record as expressing like 
sentiments even earlier than the mob ; and. about the time it 
took place he became a subscriber for the " Liberator." ^ 

I knew Mr. Ames from my youth, being born and living till 
manhood within four miles of his home. In the winter of 
1852-53, I passed three months in his law office at Canton, 
often dining with him and driving with him to hunt up evi- 

1 Sumner Memoir, vol. i. pp. 24-27, 134, 157, 173, 185, 191; vol. iii. p. 69. 



13 

dence for trials, and to explore disputed boundaries in woods 
and swamps ; and at this time he presented me for admission 
to the bar. During this intimacy we talked of Mr. Sumner 
very often, but he never mentioned the incident about the 
mob. Late in his life he first mentioned it to me on the street 
in Boston ; but I paid little attention to what he said, treating 
it as a dream of age, as his faculties were then waning and his 
mood was unlike that of earlier days. He mentioned at the 
same interview another anti-slavery leader whom he saw 
active as one of the mob, but whose name he did not include 
in the account. I first ascertained that his narrative had 
passed into print when I saw it noted in the Life of W. L. 
Garrison (vol. ii. p. 25 note), where the biographers, though 
calling it " a singularly mixed account," interpreted it, so 
far as Mr. Sumner was concerned, in the same manner I had 
interpreted it. To my note of protest Mr. W. P. Garrison 
replied : — 

" I had no personal knowledge of Mr. Ames, or I might have hesi- 
tated to cite him as I did ; but I detected his untrustworthiuess in relat- 
ing what took place about the Old State House ; for here I had a cloud 
of witnesses to check him at every point. I have referred in a note to 
his singularly confused accounts. At a distance from Boston I had to 
regard him with a certain respect, because the Massachusetts Historical 
Society admitted him to its ' Proceedings.' I think your quarrel is really 
with that Society." 

Of all reminiscences those concerning public men at Wash- 
ington are the most untrustworthy. The life of a capital city 
teems with gossip ; it abounds in rivalries, jealousies, calum- 
nies. General Sherman in a letter to Pi-esident Johnson calls 
Washington " the focus of intrigue, gossip, and slander." 
Stories of public characters have somewhat the interest of fic- 
tion, and the mass of readers care little whether they are true 
or not. Managers of magazines are keen in the search for 
them ; and the result is a medley of tales, with little of truth 
in them, and that little of truth so compounded with falsehood 
as to be worse than falsehood entire. They obtain a credence 
with even intelligent people, who fancy that what is in type 
must be true. In ten, twenty, or thirty years they are thought 
worthy of recognition as a source of history. But if any one 
canon should be rigidly observed by American historians, it is 
that Washington gossip is not history. I have had occasion 



14 

elsewhere to deal with some of these irresponsible raconteurs, 
as Miss Olive Seward, Adam Badeau, and Noah Brooks.^ Not 
seldom such writers can be impeached by a record ; and they 
are apt to expose themselves by falling into anachronisms. Now 
and then a valuable contribution, like that of General J. D. 
Cox in the " Atlantic Monthly " for August, 1895, appears ; but 
generally reminiscences of Washington life and affairs should 
be dismissed without consideration by historians. 

Mr. Lincoln has been the subject of a vast amount of remi- 
niscences, and will continue to be such for the next twenty 
years or more. Whether the true Lincoln can ever be dis- 
covered among the rubbish is doubtful. At a dinner in 
Washington the host, whose recollections have been published, 
was relating at length what Lincoln had said to him and even 
more at length what he had said to Lincoln, when a guest, 
a witty lawyer of New York Cit}^ becoming weary with 
the monotonous tale, interrupted with the question, " Will 
you not now tell us of your talks with Washington and 
Columbus?" 

Webster's memory has been the victim of reminiscences by 
one who understood him not half so well as Friday understood 
Robinson Crusoe. Mr. Lodge says of Peter Harvey's book : 
" A more untrustworthy book it would be impossible to 
imagine. There is not a statement in it which can be safely 
accepted, unless supported by other evidence. It puts its 
subject throughout in the most unpleasant light, and nothing 
has ever been written about Webster so well calculated to 
injure and belittle him as these feeble and distorted recollec- 
tions of his loving and devoted Boswell. It is the reflec- 
tion of a great man upon the mirror of a very small mind 
and weak memory." ^ And yet, as I happen to know, the 
book is not nearly so bad as it would have been without the 
revision by a most accomplished proof-reader of the Univer- 
sity Press at Cambridge. 

General Grant's " Personal Memoirs " reveal a remark- 
able inaccuracy of statement in an affair where Secretary 

1 Sumner Memoir, vol. iv. pp. 381-383, 329 note, 613-624; Centur}' Magazine, 
March, 1895, pp. 792, 793. 

2 Lodge's Webster, vol. i. p. 95 note. 



15 

Stanton, with whom his relations were not pleasant, was con- 
cerned. President Lincoln visited Richmond immediately after 
its evacuation; and while there he issued an order to General 
Weitzel to give permission to the Legislature of Virginia, — or 
rather, as the order read, to the gentlemen who have acted as 
the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion " — to 
assemble at Richmond. He then returned to Washington by 
the Potomac, reaching there the last Sunday evening of his 
life. From Washington, April 12, 1865, two days before his 
death, he himself revoked the summons to the above body, 
giving his reasons. It was his own act, and his last important 
ofQcial act. The circumstances were well known at the time, 
and shortly after became the subject of considerable discus- 
sion.^ Nevertheless, twenty years afterwards General Grant, 
in illustrating what he calls Stanton's " characteristic " as " a 
man who never questioned his own authority and who always 
did in war-time what he wanted to do," wrote that Stanton 
countermanded the above-named order, " notwithstanding the 
fact that the President was nearer the spot than he was," — 
meaning that Stanton did at Washington while Lincoln was in 
or near Richmond what in fact Lincoln himself did at Washing- 
ton.- The publishers and editors of the recent edition of the 
"Personal Memoii^s" have not seen fit to note this manifest 
error. This criticism is limited to General Grant's correctness 
as a narrator of civil affairs ; but his accuracy as a narrator of 
military affairs has also been much questioned. ^ 

American magazines have of late years teemed with descrip- 
tions of the campaigns and battles of the Civil War, contrib- 
uted by officers who had taken part in them. I cannot speak 
in detail of this literature ; but it is worthy of note that 
Colonel Robert N. Scott, who had charge of the published 
" Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Con- 
federate Armies," took a certain satisfaction in calling the 

1 Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln, vol. x. pp. 222-228. 

^ Personal Memoirs, 1st ed. vol. ii. pp. 505, 506 ; 2d ed. vol. ii. pp. 355, 35G. 

^ "From Chattanooga to Petersburg," by W. F. Smith; "Grant versus the 
Record," by Carswell McClellan ; Gen. J. D. Cox's review of tlie " Personal Me- 
moirs " in the New York " Nation," February 25 and July 1, 1886 ; " The Mistakes 
of Grant," by W. S. Rosecrans, North American Review, December, 1885, pp. 580- 
599 ; " Misunderstandings : Halleck and Grant," by J. B. Fry, Magazine of Amer- 
ican History, vol. xvi. p. 561. 



16 

attention of these magazine contributors to the disagreements 
between their official reports and what they now wrote after 
an interval of years. They had not even taken the pains 
to verify what they coramnnicated for popular reading by 
recurring to what they had written at the time on official 
responsibility.- 

It happened to me to read Wilberforce's Life when I was in 
College ; and, Butler's Analogy being then one of my textbooks, 
I noted what Pitt had said to Wilberforce, — that " the work 
raised in his mind more doubts than it had answered " (vol. i. 
p. 95). I remember to have used this extract in my examina- 
tion, and I have kept it in mind ever since. The biographers 
include this remark of Pitt among conversational memoranda 
which they had picked uj) from one source or another, and rep- 
resent it to have been made in 1785, while Wilberforce's Life 
was published in 1838. But now, one hundred and eleven 
years after the remark is said to have been made, and fifty- 
eight years after it was put in print, Mr. Gladstone, in a recent 
paper in the " Nineteenth Century," November, 1895 (pp. 721, 
722), disputes the authenticity of Pitt's reported remark, as 
being from a source " neither contemporary nor first hand," 
and " in conflict with another account of a directly opposite 
tenor," according to which Pitt commended the book. If Mr. 
Gladstone is right in his contention, what credit is to be given 
to the conversations with which biographies abound ? 

Conversations are with difficulty recorded by a listener, 
and reports of them must be taken with much allowance. In 
ordinary talk there are many omissions to be filled by the con- 
text, — by what has been said before, either on the same or an 
earlier occasion. Then, too, expression and gesture are left 
to correct an imperfect sentence or complete an unfinished 
thought. Much depends also not only on the narrator's skill, 
but also on his abstinence from the natural disposition to color 
his record by his own feelings and ideas. The late Henry 
Wilson, just after reading a well-known diary containing much 
reported to have been said by public men, said to me that he 
would not talk with any one whom he knew to be keeping a 
diary. Perhaps he had premonitions of similar records con- 
cerning himself ; for his own conversations as to public men 
and events were singularly free and unguarded. The late 



17 

Nassau W. Senior often visited Paris, where lie mingled freely 
with scholars and public men ; and his notes of the " Conver- 
sations " he listened to have been published. I once men- 
tioned these to Michel Chevalier ; and he said that there was 
a good deal of Mr. Senior in them, — meaning that Mr. Senior 
in undertaking to report others had fallen into the habit of 
recording his own thoughts. 

Somewhat kindred to the topic in hand is the credibility of 
diaries. These must often be taken at a discount. Assuming 
the veracity of the writer, he is apt not to confine himself to 
what he really knows. For instance, J. Q. Adams in his Diary 
(vol. xii. p. 274) attributes to Webster the authorship of Whig 
resolutions in September, IS^G ; but intrinsic as well as outside 
evidence points to another author, — J. Thomas Stevenson, a 
merchant of the time, who reported them to the convention. 
They lack terseness and vigor, — qualities which predominate 
in Webster's style.^ 

But whatever may be the value of diaries, greater or less 
according to the moral and intellectual character of the diarist 
and his opportunities of observation, no credit should be given 
to anonymous diaries. Those wiiich cannot be tested by the 
character of the diarist are worthless, and should never be cited 
except to be repudiated. No honest narrator will withhold his 
name from what he declares to the world he has seen or heard. 
A single instance must suffice. The '' North American Review " 
in 1879 (vol. cxxix. pp. 125, 375, 484) printed what purported 
to be the "Diary of a Public Man," describing, with personal 
details of various public men, what was going on in New York 
City and Washington in the winter of 1860-1861, just before 
the outbreak of the Rebellion. The editor, A. T. Rice, refused 
to give the name of the writer to George T. Curtis, the biog- 
grapher of President Buchanan.^ Other persons have sought 
to learn the authorship of this " Diary," but without success ; 
and perhaps, Mr. Rice having died, it is unknown to any living 
person. Several names have been suggested, but probably 
without reason. The latest theory is that the " Diary " is a 
pure invention, — a fictitious narrative by an adventurer re- 

1 Memoir of Charles Sumner, vol. iii. pp. 124 note, 125 note. 
^ President Buchanan's Life, vol. ii. pp. 391 note, 394, 395. 



18 

cently deceased, who had much to do with newspapers and 
magazines, who had a career both in this country and in Eng- 
land, and who late in his life figured in a scandalous trial in 
London. He was able, by a general knowledge of social 
occasions and of the presence of public men in the two cities, 
to give an air of probability to his narrative ; but a close 
scrutiny reveals his untrustworthiness. 

This diarist makes himself the most remarkable personage 
of modern times. His counsels and mediation were eagerly 
sought by men of adverse opinions and positions, and he was 
admitted by them to most confidential interviews. Among 
these were Douglas, Seward, Sumner, the British Minister, 
and the Confederate chiefs Orr and Forsyth. He was solicited 
to assist in making the Cabinet ; all the departments were 
open to him ; and Lincoln, as soon as he was in office, though 
weighted with unexampled burdens, put aside all other duties 
to receive him and listen to his wisdom. Who could be this 
marvellous man, so miscellaneous in his affiliations, whose 
thoughts statesmen yearned to hear in those dread hours ? It 
is easier to suppose that he did not exist than to point him 
out among the characters of that eventful period. 

The "Diary " bears in some entries intrinsic evidence of not 
being genuine. In the first place it attributes to Mr. Sumner 
activity in cabinet-making, — a function from which by taste 
and habit he kept aloof. In the next place it states that the 
diarist and another person held by appointment a conference 
with President Lincoln March 7, his third day in office, and 
in the afternoon of that day. Now it a23pears, by the public 
journals of March 8, that on the afternoon of the 7th the Presi- 
dent gave a formal reception, his first one, to the diplomatic 
corps, — a protracted ceremonial. After its conclusion there 
would not have been time before dinner, which then came at 
an early hour in Washington, — that is, about six, — for such 
a conference as the diarist pretends to describe. Again, he 
substitutes blanks for names ; and this eighteen years after 
the date, when the prominent actors, long since dead, could 
not be compromised by publicity. The suppression of names 
is an obvious mode of securing a fictitious narrative against 
detection. 

In 1886, seven years after it appeared, I undertook to test 
the "Diary" as well as I could. I found only one person 



19 

living with whom its writer described an interview, — indeed, 
I think the only person named in that way who was living 
when the " Diary " appeared ; and it is not unlikely, as that 
one had retired from active life, that the diarist thought him 
dead also. This was Hiram Barney,^ who became, a few weeks 
after the reported interview with him, Collector of the Port 
of New York. I had become intimate with Mr. Barney as 
early as 1856, having formed an acquaintance with him still 
earlier. He lived till May 18th of last year. The Diary 
reports a conversation with him February 20, 1861, just after he 
had come from a breakfast at Moses H. Grinnell's, given to Mr. 
Lincoln, who was then on his way to Washington. The break- 
fast did indeed take place, and is mentioned the next day in 
the " New York Tribune," with the names of several of the 
guests ; but Mr. Barney is not named in the list, and in fact 
did not attend, contrary to the statement of the " Diary." In 
answer to my inquiry as to his presence and the conversation 
alleged to have taken place immediately after, he replied, 
October 5, 1886 : — 

" I recollect the article in the ' N. A. Review ' to which you refer, — 
' Diary of a Public Man ' ; and as I could not recollect his interview 
with me to which he refers, was anxious at the time to know who he 
was. I applied to Appleton & Co., the publishers, but they could not 
or would not inform me. I do not think that liis statement, so far as it 
regards my calling upon him at his hotel, or the breakfast at Grinnell's, 
or Mr. Lincoln, had a particle of truth in it. There was no such 
breakfast, and no such interview, and no such statements, and probably 
the author was a romancer. If you should ever find out who the 
author was, I wish you would tell me." 

I replied promptly to Mr. Barney that there was a break- 
fast at Grinnell's, repeating the names of guests mentioned in 
the " Tribune " ; and he answered, October 7 : — 

" I have yours of the 6th. I am sure that I did not attend the 
breakfast at Grinnell's Feb. 20, '61. It was not such a gathering 
as at that time I would probably be invited to or would care to attend. 
There are some of my special friends in the list, such as Charles H. 
Marshall, H. Fish, and T. Tileston ; there are others, such as John J. 
Astor, John A. Stevens, Aspinwall, and Minturn, with whom I was on 
friendly terms enough, but not very intimate ; then there were others 

^ Diary, etc., pp. 137, 138. 



20 

with whom I was never on any terms of cordiality. It was, with few 
exceptions, a Seward crowd ; and such people were wholly unsympa- 
thetic with me. I may have heard of the breakfast at the time, and it 
now seems probable that it really occurred; but it does not seem possi- 
ble that I called on the writer in the ' N. A. Review,' whoever he was, 
and had with him any conversation, certainly not the conversation 
which he reports. I have tried to find out the writer, but stat ?iommis 
utnbra in spite of all my efforts to uncover him. I do not even suspect 
who he may be." 

It is not difficult to explain all this. The " romancer," as 
Mr. Barney calls him, knew from the public journals that there 
was a breakfast at Mr. Grinnell's ; he imagined that Mr. Bar- 
ney, as a friend of Lincoln and Chase, was likely to have been 
one of the guests ; he supposed, in 1879, that Mr. Barney, who 
had passed out of sight, was no longer living to dispute his 
statement, and that it was therefore safe to put into his mouth 
any words he pleased. As the facts now appear, the " Diary 
of a Public Man " must be regarded as a fiction, — nothing 
more nor less. 

The reading of Mr. Pierce's paper was followed by an in- 
formal discussion, in which Messrs. George S. Hale, Justin 
WiNSOR, William Everett, Barrett Wendell, William 
W. Goodwin, Samuel A. Green, Samuel F. McCleary, 
and Albert B. Hart took part. 



° °!ii!5 080 1 ^ 





